-
Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley
Teaching History article
Thelma Wiltshire applies a ‘telling' and ‘suggesting' strategy to an enquiry involving an historical site. Getting beyond more simplistic approaches to ‘fact' and ‘opinion', she describes how a pack of curriculum materials was designed to give pupils a precise language to talk about layers of certainty and uncertainty in their...
Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley
-
Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects
Teaching History article
Lots has been written in recent years about how history teachers can bring academic scholarship into the classroom. This article takes this interest in academic practice a step further, examining how pupils can engage directly with the kinds of sources to which historians are increasingly turning their attention: the ‘everyday’ objects of ordinary life. Building on...
Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects
-
Triumphs Show 108: Getting the whole school buzzing about history
Teaching History feature
It was the brainwave of the English department to bring in a script writer to work with Key Stage 3 students of the full ability range writing the lower school production. This was too good an opportunity for the history department to miss.
Triumphs Show 108: Getting the whole school buzzing about history
-
Beyond the classroom: developing student teachers' work with museums and historic sites
Teaching History article
Working visits to historical sites for the purposes of developing pupils’ historical understanding can be extremely useful. As part of their training, student teachers need to acquire understanding and skills in the planning and management of worthwhile ‘fieldwork’. This work can be very powerful indeed if it emerges from co-operation...
Beyond the classroom: developing student teachers' work with museums and historic sites
-
Were industrial towns 'death-traps'? Year 9 learn to question generalisations and to challenge their preconceptions about the 'boring' 19th century
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Kimberley Anthony and her history colleagues were troubled by Year 9's assumption that World War II was the only interesting thing that they were going to do in Year 9. Nineteenth-century industrialisation, even their own...
Were industrial towns 'death-traps'? Year 9 learn to question generalisations and to challenge their preconceptions about the 'boring' 19th century
-
Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
Teaching History article
Historians and history teachers understand well that students, when they ‘answer’ questions, are creating their own interpretation. We take account of this in our teaching too: we do not pretend that, beyond the level of the simplest closed questioning, there is ever a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer approach to history....
Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
-
Late Medieval Taxation Records
Historian article
There are more than 23,000 medieval taxation records from England and Wales in the Public Record Office alone. For many years the vast majority of them have lain undisturbed in their archive boxes, but recent work is showing the true value of some of these as historical sources and making...
Late Medieval Taxation Records
-
King Charles II
Classic Pamphlet
The conclusions of historians change over the years, not only as a result of the discovery of new evidence, but as a result of the changing times in which historians themselves live and work. We have become familiar with the notion that each generation of historians may have its own...
King Charles II
-
Move Me On 92: Having problems teaching causation
The problem page for history mentors
This Issue's Problem: Melville Miles, student history teacher, is in Term 3 of his PGCE year. Melville has taught a number of excellent lessons in which he enabled pupils to reach high levels of historical understanding. His diagnostic assessment of pupils' work is unusually sophisticated for a PGCE student. Melville's...
Move Me On 92: Having problems teaching causation
-
Film: Acts of Union and Disunion
An Interview with Linda Colley
Professor Linda Colley CBE, FBA, FRSL, FRHistS is a British Historian and a Fellow of the Historical Association.
At the start of 2014 she wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 series about the Acts of Union and Disunion, now a book. Over the summer she came into the HA...
Film: Acts of Union and Disunion
-
Saint Robert and the Deer
Article
It is almost a commonplace that there is an affinity between a holy man and the creatures of the wild. The archetype is St. Francis of Assisi but the phenomenon was well marked both before and after his time. I would like to consider briefly an episode in the life...
Saint Robert and the Deer
-
Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Fred North treats ‘Assessment for Learning' as though it is a bolt-on extra unconnected to his learning objectives
Fred is an enthusiastic trainee who has generally made a good impression on students and colleagues over the course of his first term. He has been determined to establish a...
Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
-
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
-
Cunning Plan 98: Britain 1750-1900
Teaching History feature
Isaac Newton: ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'. Learning that results from action and reaction deepens pupils' understanding of historical content and use of key study skills. It forces them to understand, to wrestle, to articulate, to challenge, to question. Getting pupils to act and react...
Cunning Plan 98: Britain 1750-1900
-
Right up my street: the knowledge needed to plan a local history enquiry
Journal article
Inspired by the claim that local history can be taught effectively ‘Any time, any place, anywhere’, Katharine Burn and Jason Todd took up the challenge of planning Key Stage 3 enquiries related to an unusual and diverse, but frequently neglected and often despised, corner of Oxford. They sought not merely...
Right up my street: the knowledge needed to plan a local history enquiry
-
Polychronicon 172: Health in the Middle Ages
Teaching History feature
The history of medicine, health, and illness between c. 500 AD and 1500 has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent decades. It’s a fascinating field that can tell us a great deal about medieval people’s everyday lives and their day-to-day worries: after all, everyone is ill or...
Polychronicon 172: Health in the Middle Ages
-
Life by sources A to F: really using sources to teach AS history
Teaching History article
The work of Gary Howells will be familiar to many readers of Teaching History—indeed, his last article is heavily cited elsewhere in this edition. He presents here the case in favour of using sources at AS level (16-17 years old). Clearly, historians need to have some form of acquaintance with...
Life by sources A to F: really using sources to teach AS history
-
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
Teaching History article
It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In...
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
-
Move Me On 153: Teaching about genocide
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Susie Cook is struggling to sustain an emphasis on developing historical knowledge and understanding in teaching about genocide.
Susie Cook worked for nearly ten years as a web designer before deciding to move into teaching. Once she had secured her place on the programme she spent several months...
Move Me On 153: Teaching about genocide
-
William Morris, Art and the Rise of the British Labour Movement
Article
Commenting in early 1934 at the University College, Hull, at the time of the centenary of William Morris’ birth and of a large exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the historian and active socialist, G.D.H. Cole commented, William Morris’ influence is very much alive today: but let us not...
William Morris, Art and the Rise of the British Labour Movement
-
Note-making, knowledge-building and critical thinking are the same thing
Teaching History article
Heidi Le Cocq sets out the classic problem of the history teacher: how does she cover the content and ensure that pupils reflect and analyse at the same time? She relates this to a another problem: how do you prepare pupils well for coursework (ensuring, for example, that they adopt...
Note-making, knowledge-building and critical thinking are the same thing
-
Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
Article
Connecting Classrooms: bringing together Bradford and Peshawar, primary and secondary schools, history and English
In this article, Dianne Excell shares her experience of a crossphase, collaborative project funded by the British Council that brought together teachers and pupils from three schools in Bradford and five schools in Peshawar, Pakistan. Although...
Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
-
The Hopi is different from the Pawnee: using a datafile to explore pattern and diversity
Article
Dave Martin identifies the factors which led to new knowledge and understanding in a mixed ability Year 7 class. Not only did these pupils acquire greater knowledge of the native peoples of North America, they also learned transferable techniques for identifying and analysing pattern and diversity. Clear learning objectives led...
The Hopi is different from the Pawnee: using a datafile to explore pattern and diversity
-
Religion and Science in the Eighteenth Century
Historian article
Much has been said about the clash between religion and science in Victorian times but there has been less research into the relationship between them in the eighteenth century. This article considers three Georgian clergymen who were also notable scientists – the Reverend William Stukeley, the pioneer of scientific field...
Religion and Science in the Eighteenth Century
-
Martin Luther King - Judge for Yourself
Book Review
Judge For Yourself: Martin Luther King by Christine Hatt, pub 2009,Evans Publishing, p/b £9.99, ISBN: 978 0 237 53624 4
Reviewed by Alf Wilkinson
This is a re-issue of a book published in 2002, but now out in paperback for the first time. The first part of the book is...
Martin Luther King - Judge for Yourself
